tkArena look at the past, present and future of notebook batteries. When it comes to mobile computing, battery life is of utmost concern. … Mobile computing batteries have undergone many changes over the past several years and at present there are three discrete battery types on the market. Let's take a closer look at each type.

According to Hardware Zone, Intel's X58 chipset will have native SLI support. SLI support is only applicable to motherboard OEM/ODM folks whose Intel X58 motherboards have passed NVIDIA's certification process, for which NVIDIA will issue a special code string (or otherwise known as a token) to the motherboard OEM/ODMs to reprogram the board's system BIOS and enable SLI support.

A new survey by Cyber-Ark found that 88% of IT administrators admitted they would take corporate secrets if they were made redundant. The research also revealed that, of that 88 percent, a third would take the privilege password list to gain access to valuable documents such as financial reports, accounts, salaries and other privileged information.

AnandTech look at the performance of several gaming laptops. The first thing you need to realize going in is that gaming laptops aren't your everyday laptop. Yes, they are more than capable of running all of the tasks that you would do on a typical business laptop, but the addition of a high-end graphics card invariably means that battery life will be a secondary consideration.

Happy Friday, bet you all wish you were as lucky as me and never had to work Fridays. :)

The guys over at Techpowerup have a chat to the co-founder and co-owner of Lavalys, Tamas "Fiery" Miklos, who created Everest, the popular hardware monitoring software. He talks about his personal background, first experience with computers and how he came to make Everest.

PCPro have an interesting article posted up here, about the Space Cube. It's a 2 inch square computer, boasting 300MHz CPU, a SD card slot, and 64MB of DDR RAM.

It has been confirmed by Hexus that Abit are infact exiting the mainboard market by the end of the year. [Aww, my KX7A (I think it was) was such a great board after it was RMA'ed 3 times.]

TeamXbox had a chance to talk to George Broussard, who is co-owner/president of 3D Realms, who talks about Duke 3D coming soon to Xbox Live Arcade, and they even ask him about Duke Nukem Forever. Read the full interview here.

HotHardware attended NVIDIA's very first NVISION 08 visual computing conference that took place August 25 - 27 in San Jose, California and captured some of the sights and sounds from the event. This video is a compilation of the featured speakers and artists that participated in the keynotes.

Tech ARP have posted an article about NVIDIA refuting claims of bad GPUs. Charlie Demerjian of the Inquirer reported last month that NVIDIA G84 and G86 GPUs were failing left and right. Unfortunately, not only the G84 and G86 parts are affected. According to the Inquirer, even G92 and G94 parts are failing as well. If true, it is really very bad news, as the G92 and G94 are very popular parts, powering the GeForce 9800 GTX, the GeForce 9600 GT, the GeForce 8800 GTS 512MB and the GeForce 8800 GT. So we queried NVIDIA to get their view of the matter.

Squirt758 sent in news about Psystar countersuing Apple. Wannabe Mac cloners Psystar hired itself some hotshot lawyers to defend against Apple's lawsuit, and they're not wasting any time earning their fees -- as Psystar's hinted in the past, it's going to countersue Apple for antitrust violations and ask that the court declare the Leopard EULA void.

The guys from Madshrimps took a trip to Amsterdam, where MSI held its first European Overclocking Challenge. Full read here.

PCStats had a tour around the Gigabyte motherboard factory. Without a doubt, motherboards are the most complex and essential part of the modern PC. With this in mind, it's surprising to learn the amount of work and machinery involved in manufacturing a single motherboard. As PCSTATS recent trip to Gigabyte's Nan-Ping factory in Taiwan showed us, there's a lot more to it. In fact, producing and testing a single motherboard involves a mind-boggling host of automated machines, people and processes; follow along and we'll show you how things are really made.

Tweaktown have a DIY guide on how to use an old router as a wireless access point.

And finally, to make your Friday that bit more awesome, here is an awesome ninja timewaster sent in by Squirt758.

Very short notice, but here's some good news for Sydneysiders who are keen to go along to the Australian grand finals of the Gigabyte Overclocking Competition TOMORROW (FRIDAY) NIGHT in Darling Harbour. According to moloko_vellocet there are 15 tickets up for grabs for OCAU readers. First in first served!

NVIDIA have dropped a bit of a bombshell at the last minute in their NVISION08 show. In short, Intel's X58 will be the first non-NVIDIA motherboard chipset to natively support SLI multi-GPU technology. Here's some slides with info:

This story has been doing the rounds for a week or so now, but Sciby found a good article that sums it all up. Anyway, someone got their shiny new iPhone and discovered photos of a factory worker on it. A CHINESE factory worker has become an internet celebrity after her smiling face was accidentally loaded onto an Apple iPhone and shipped to the other side of the world.

Speaking of iPhones, someone in IRC pointed out this interesting blog about adding controls to make gaming better. You guys are really going to enjoy playing games with this thing, it is like night to day in terms of how much better it is with real controls.

Thermaltake have made another gargantuan CPU cooler, discussion here. The BigTyp14 Pro features a VR-controlled 14cm fan that promises excellent cooling performance and noise output at low as 16dBA. It offers a universal clip that'll support most CPUs, and a mirror-coated copper base. There are six copper heatpipes and 69 aluminium fins on each side to help dissipate heat.

Apparently some of the Space Station's laptops have been infected with a virus. Not a cool space virus, just a boring old Earth computer virus. NASA declined to name the virus, but SpaceRef.com, which broke the story, reported that the worm was W32.Gammima.AG worm -- a worm first detected in August 2007 that installs software that steals credentials for online games. So if they're playing WoW in their spare time they could be in trouble. :) Another link here, thanks Murray. Discussion here.

Nick sent word about Mozilla Ubiquity. Today we’re announcing the launch of Ubiquity, a Mozilla Labs experiment into connecting the Web with language in an attempt to find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.

From Mr.Sinister: Hey guys thought you might be interested in posting this up (along with news of the Canon 50D heh). Nikon have released the D90. OCAU thread here.

German site ModMyMachine have some tutorial videos (in English). They're about mounting waterblocks on video cards, covering the HD4850 and HD4870.

Tom's Hardware have published a massive 11-Way P45 motherboard shootout. When Intel released its mainstream P45, the biggest news was that it supported PCI Express 2.0. Formerly available from Intel only on high-end X38 and X48 motherboards , many of us still failed to understand the significance of this bandwidth-doubling technology to current-generation hardware. After all, the first-generation x16 slots found on P35 Express motherboards are still fast enough for any graphics card, so why bother updating?

The Tech Report gets hands on with Acer's Aspire One netbook. Perhaps because netbooks are generally seen as accessories to a primary computer, Acer has designed the One with an aesthetic flair that is second only to the HP Mini-Note 2133. A pearl white finish with black trim and metallic orange hinge accents delivers more visual impact than the Eee. Discussion on the forum.

Canon have announced the introduction of the Canon EOS 50D. The replacement for the prosumer 40D, with a 15.1 Megapixel APS-C size sensor, ISO 100-3200 (expandable to 12800) and 6.3fps continuous shooting with a max. burst of 90 JPEGs with UDMA cards. Discussion on the forum.

TweakTown get busy with Western Digital's VelociRaptor. The Western Digital VelociRaptor is more than just a platter upgrade. The new controller takes advantage of Native Command Queuing and also reduces access time even more. Chris tests three generations of Raptors including the latest VelociRaptor in both single and RAID 0 modes.

HardwareZone preview Lenovo's IdeaPad S10 and Y530 netbooks. Some of you may have already seen Lenovo's latest netbook in action online since it's unveiling in Taiwan, but because the people over at Lenovo are really nice folks and we asked really nicely, we now have an engineering prototype to play with and for you to get a quick look at before the actual launch in September.

Meanwhile, Hot Hardware review Lenovo's ThinkPad X200 Ultraportable Notebook. The X200 is not as stylishly thin or technologically advanced as the X300 and its missing a few of the X300's novel features like an ultra compact optical drive. However the X200 still has plenty going for it, not the least of which is twice the processing power and half the price, compared to the X300. With a compact 12.1" chassis, full-power Core 2 Duo processor and ThinkPad durability.

Extreme Tech compared performance between 2GB and 4GB memory configurations. This article sets out to try to answer all kinds of memory questions herein. Using nearly identical motherboards to test both DDR2 and DDR3, we ran all kinds of performance tests, subjective and repeatable, synthetic and real-world.

Ever wondered where cell phones go to die? Technology Review has a photo essay on the process. If you've recently replaced your cell phone, you're not alone. More than half a billion cell phones were swapped for newer models in 2007, according to a study by the research firm Gartner.

Girls, girls and more girls! TechPowerUp have over 240 photos of girls from the recent Games Convention 2008. Not much to be said really... ;-D

AirQ reminded us that Photosynth has been released for free. The company demonstrated Photosynth, software that arranges photo sets in their real-world, 3-D context and allows people to navigate smoothly around the canals of Venice, for example, or zoom in to read the serial numbers on the space shuttle's heat shields. Check it out here, discussion here.

Microsoft apparently hired Jerry Seinfeld recently, to promote Windows Vista. More info here. Seinfeld will reportedly receive some US$10 million for his role in the curiously titled "Windows, Not Walls" campaign.

TGDaily have more info about NVIDIA's GPU problems which may be more widespread than originally thought. According to our sources, the failures are caused by a solder bump that connects the I/O termination of the silicon chip to the pad on the substrate. In Nvidia’s GPUs, this solder bump is created using high-lead. A thermal mismatch between the chip and the substrate has substantially grown in recent chip generations, apparently leading to fatigue cracking. Discussion here.

Tweaktown have a suitcase PC DIY guide. Up on the bench today we have a special DIY workshop tutorial in building your own LAN party case on a budget. We take an ordinary cheap flight case and mount a full PC inside so you can truck it to and from the party with ease.

PCPerspective keep on reporting live from NVISION 08, while HotHardware cover Jen-Hsun Huang's keynote. A few months ago, NVIDIA first told us about their plans to organize a massive event called NVISION that focused on all things in the visual computing field. NVIDIA planned to take over a number of major venues in downtown San Jose, including the convention center and a number of adjacent hotels, and invite experts and celebrities from the high-performance computing, gaming, video, movies, and graphics fields, to participate. Tech-Report have their coverage posted too, as do Modders-Inc.

VUNet report on a traceless browsing mode for IE8. Many industry pundits have been quick to point out the most obvious use of the feature, nicknaming it "porn mode," in reference to the ability to view adult sites without leaving a trail for employers or family members to follow.

PCPerspective, have Nehalem microarchitecture details, while HWSecrets look in detail at QuickPath Interconnect. QuickPath Interconnect is the name of the external bus used by the Intel forthcoming CPUs with integrated memory controller, like the Core i7. In this tutorial we will explain how this bus works.

The industry crunch claims another scalp, with long-term OCAU sponsor SecretNet ceasing trading. Things have been increasingly difficult the last two years for SecretNet. We have watched a large number of competitors, both friendly and hostile, strain and collapse. We've even seen some of our own distributors collapse under the changing marketplace that has now faced the industry.

I've actually known Andypoo and SecretNet since before OCAU began, and of course Andypoo is an OCAU admin and has appeared on our podcast several times. SecretNet's focus has always been on customer service. They carved out a little niche of their own with their amazingly automated website, system builder function and family-service feel. SecretNet customers tended to be extremely loyal and it was obvious why. It's a real shame to see them go but I completely understand and support their decision. Andypoo of course already has plenty to keep him occupied, now living in Estonia, and our best wishes go to the rest of the staff.

The Nigerian high commissioner has apparently suggested that Australians ripped off by scams are as guilty as the fraudsters. He said media coverage of fraudulent activity stemming from Nigeria had given the country "a bad image" and "those who want to transact business with us are always very suspicious". Discussion here.

Gary spotted some handy tips for optimising Photoshop CS3 performance. Some obvious ones, some less so. If there is a damaged font on your system and you have WYSIWYG font preview turned on, your computer can slow significantly. If you turn off font preview and your computer performance improves significantly, test for a damaged font.

Mpot noticed this cool video about using Wiimotes to make an interactive multi-touch whiteboard. Also the 3D head-tracking we saw a while ago.

Digit-Kife ponder the NVIDIA nForce 700a and GeForce 8000 Chipsets. The idea to integrate a graphics core into all chipsets looks quite natural for NVIDIA, which strategical task has always been to promote its own graphics solutions in its chipsets.

HWSecrets want to tell us about wireless USB. Wireless USB (WUSB) products are finally arriving at the market and in this article you will learn more about this technology and see some usage examples.

From mshagg: Not sure if you guys are aware of the newest thing in PC sim racing - iRacing. This is from the crew who made the Nascar 1/2/3/4/2002/03 series, GPL etc. A few of us on the forums have been driving for a few weeks, some of them months. Anyways it goes live to the public tomorrow morning, local time (there’s a countdown on the website). Up until now its been beta testers and invitations via their mailing list, so we all get to see how it does as a commercial product now.

SMH have an article on case modding, with a few big names mentioned from Australia and overseas. No mention of OCAU though, boo. ;) Anyway, discussion here in the Modding forum, naturally enough.

Lucid's HYDRA technology attracted a lot of interest at IDF, with people suggesting it could make ATI's Crossfire and NVIDIA's SLI obselete. Techgage checked it out, as did Tech Report. Their claims sounded odd and perhaps too good to be true. But not only were they were present on the show floor at IDF, they were showing a demo of working silicon. Remarkably enough, it appears they may just be on to something big.

NVIDIA have their own big event, NVISION 08. Techgage report on it, as do LegitReviews. NVISION 08 is a first-of-its-kind mega-event that has been designed to take attendees behind the scenes of the visual revolution.

BlueAvatar sent in an e-mail asking everyone to be cautious of a 4GB MP4 player that Aldi is currently selling as his contained a virus. It looked suspicious so I scanned it with clam and it came back as a trojan. I then uploaded it to Virscan.org (after renaming it so I didnt accidentially execute it) to double check. Results are here.

NordicHardware have coverage of the Advanced Overclocking Championship held in Berlin. As we were closing in on the end of the Advanced Overclocking Championship a tensed aura was hovering the room. Would Kinc and crotale managed to reclaim the lead from the Polish team?

A recent discussion hosted by NASA's CoLab included topics such as 'can someone own land on the moon?' and 'can one sell the resources gathered from the moon in a mining operation?'. Within the next 10 years, the U.S., China, Israel, and a host of private companies plan to set up camp on the moon. So if and when they plant a flag, does that give them property rights?

AirQ sent in this article on the 'Deus Ex Machina' – "a wearable motorbike that brings superhero-style transport into the real world." The pretentiously named vehicle clamps to the rider like Ripley's exoskeleton in Aliens, and will power them to 60 mph in just three seconds, topping out at 75 mph.

Apparently any Team Fortress 2 updates on the PS3 and the Xbox 360 may not be free. "On the PC side, we've done as many as four updates in a day, and that's great: we can respond very quickly." … "On the consoles, they want us to charge money for them, because that's in their model, and our model is very much more to grow the community by giving out free updates."

Matt sent in this timewaster for a lazy Sunday morning. Shadez: The Black Operations is the first in the series of this game. The player is placed into the role of General of a Mercenary force. This force has been hired by the governments around the world to fight the wars they do not want to fight or they don't want to declare this, keeping it top secret and out of the hands of the press.

The Games Convention 08 in Leipzig, Germany, is in full swing this week. Many exhibitors use the GC – Games Convention as a launch pad for the earth-shattering market introduction of their new products, because the fair gives them the ideal platform for the strategic positioning of their own games and equipment in full view of the media, the public and industry.

TweakTown analyse AMD's new Catalyst version 8.8 drivers and see how they perform under XP and Vista. This month, looking through the release notes for the latest incarnation of Catalyst drivers we see that a few performance increases have been promised. We'll see if these performance increases translate to any of the games we use. Discussion on the forum.

Driver Heaven round-up eight popular motherboards for Intel processors. Today we will be comparing eight motherboards for Intel processors and showing how each performs as well as looking at the features they have to offer. Tests include gaming, media playback, image manipulation and more, so by the end of the article we should be a bit better placed to know which chipset or board is ideal for consumers using Intel processors.

AnandTech take a moment to explain Intel's upcoming Nehalem microarchitecture. It’s a new architecture, at least newer than Penryn, but still built on the same 45nm process that debuted with Penryn. Next year we’ll have the 32nm version of Nehalem called Westmere and then Sandy Bridge, a brand new architecture also built on 32nm. But today is all about Nehalem. Discussion on the forum.

Nvidia yesterday released CUDA 2.0, a new version of its C language development environment for its graphics processing units. Nvidia released the second generation of CUDA, the company’s C-based programming environment that enables developers to tap into GPUs to accelerate their applications. There are several new features included, most interestingly a Photoshop plug-in example that provides guidelines how to design plug-ins that run on the GPU. Download available here.

The Tech Report take the time to review Asus' Eee PC 1000 40G netbook. The first Eee PC, despite its infectious novelty and honest-to-goodness utility, what is now known as the 700 series is hampered by too many limitations to be a viable notebook replacement for most folks. Asus' new Eee PC 1000 40G, however, is another beast entirely.

Microsoft's Live Labs have released Photosynth, an PC tool/plug-in that allows you to upload your own photos and have them automatically transformed into what Microsoft call a 'synth', basically a 3D fly-through reconstruction of your home, your vacation, or anything else you can take pictures of. Unfortunately I haven’t had a chance to try it myself, so i can’t comment on how good it works.

Tech ARP have updated their desktop graphics card comparison guide. These days, there are so many desktop graphics card models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications.

Sciby spotted this almost-too-good photographs enhancing video technology. I'm not quite convinced that the entire process is quite as automatic as the students would make it, but the technology is extremely promising all the same.

Meanwhile from Silicon Angel, about facial animations: TimesOnline have an article covering new animation technology from Image Metrics (the company behind facial animations in the GTA series) including a video sample of their work, ‘Emily’. Obviously this kind of work is only possible by image-capturing a live actor and overlaying a computer generated model with a new skin – we’re still quite a way from this level of realism in a pure animated-from-scratch model.

Intel are focussing on wireless recharging, thanks AirQ. "Something like this technology could be embedded in tables and work surfaces," said Justin Rattner, Intel's chief technology officer, "so as soon as you put down an appropriately equipped device it would immediately begin drawing power."

Phoronix looked at AMD OverDrive and ATI Radeon CrossFire on Linux. While AMD is still working to address some issues with their ATI Linux driver, they have been working hard on new features like CrossFire. How does this feature work though on Linux and does it deliver similar performance gains to their Windows driver?

TweakTown visited Gigabyte HQ to check out a dummy sample of the GA-X58-Extreme motherboard. GIGABYTE's X58 Extreme lacks some features such as onboard hardware RAID and TPM (which are found on DQ6 and some other models) with the philosophy being that the Extreme range of mobos is designed purely for overclockers and high-end enthusiasts and they don’t need these extra features.

Meanwhile, Bit-tech looked at another Gigabyte motherboard, the GA-EP45-DS3R. The performance is excellent once you get it in the sweet spot, although we can't really recommend the board in its current state if you want to use CrossFire - we had to dial back the memory performance really quite far, and in our stability test the graphics portion again couldn't take it, even if Prime95 continued to churn out results unhindered.

Madshrimps got their hands on a pair of OCZ DDR3 PC3-16000 Flex II Edition RAM modules. After we solved the multiplier glitch with the motherboard, the memory moved to 2Ghz without complaining. It actually felt like it was barely stretching its legs. 1.85 Volts was enough to reach 2Ghz, and though our motherboard wouldn't play getting higher, I have no doubt it is capable of more.

AirQ noticed this article about five of the world's top games developers demanding payment from 25,000 people in the UK suspected of illegally downloading computer games. This week Isabela Barwinska, an unemployed mother of two, became the first person in the UK to be ordered to pay damages to a manufacturer. She must pay more than £16,000 to Topware after downloading Dream Pinball through a file-sharing site.

Hardware Zone are wondering whether the new iPhone 3G is worth all the hype surrounding it. Even before its official launch, rumors of the iPhone's second coming were rampant. When Mr. Steve Jobs finally announced it during the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) earlier this year, the media were quick to feed on the news, and constantly generated a buzz about the phone.

Elsewhere in the world, OC3D report on the ASUS Advanced Overclocking Championship and Futurelooks were at Fragapalooza 2008 in Canada. In four days this huge event crams in a convention centre sized BYOC area, gaming tournaments, random draws and prizes, and more caffeine then is healthy for human consumption.

Apparently Aussies are taking up Macs quicker than people in other nations. If Mac sales continue to grow at this rate, the platform will have a double-figure market share within a few years. Wow! ;) Discussion here.

InsideHW look at multimedia streaming. If you are TV fan and you have wireless network and notebook, than you probably at some point thought how it would be nice to take your notebook and simply move to other room, go on balcony or backyard and with no interruptions from other householders watch your favorite show or some sport event.

Wayne sent word that the RBA is talking to eBay and PayPal about the recent payment rules changes. "Consistent with this, the bank will shortly be holding discussions with PayPal with a view to seeking the removal of these rules," the RBA said today.

TomsHardware report from IDF about some automatic overclocking features of Intel's upcoming i7 (aka Nehalem) CPUs. Although not quite like the retro turbo mode button found on computers of the late 1980’s, the turbo mode on Core i7 will still result in increased single threaded performance.

Actually there's quite a lot of Nehalem stuff coming down from IDF, not too surprisingly. HardOCP have some slides and a video with lots more info. Techgage have more details also.

PCPerspective meanwhile have live blogging from IDF. What does that entail? I sit in a conference hall or press meeting and listen to technical and executives at Intel and post up notes, information, pictures and more live as it happens so you get the news in as close to real time as possible.

It's been a while since we've heard anything about ATI's "All-In-Wonder" graphics/tuner cards, full of bells and whistles. HotHardware discovered a new HD version on the way. This was an area of the market where ATI had exclusivity, yet we haven't seen a new All-In-Wonder offering since May 2006. Rest assured however, ATI has not abandoned the All-In-Wonder, they've simply been working on the next iteration of the Graphic/TV-Tuner stalwart, with their latest offering coming in the form of the ATI All-In-Wonder HD.

There's a cool NES stealth PC mod worklog over on exoid.com. That's right, I will be building a retro gaming computer using my favorite mini-itx board the D201GLY2, and my trusty companion that has been in the family for longer than most of my brothers and sisters. The goal with this build is going to be complete sleeper looks. What I mean by that is that the NES will be absolutely indistinguishable from a stock NES, completely stealth.

You might remember Mr Chilled reviewing the Popcorn Hour A-100 media player a couple of months ago. Lanko069 noticed there's some new versions, and they're reviewed here on DigitalReviews. To the untrained eye, the A-100 and the A-110 are nearly identical. Both units share the same case and bar a few minor technical changes, look exactly the same. By contrast, the B-110 is a Mini-ITX variant of their Popcorn hardware - and while functionally similarly, it looks completely different.

Nick Ross and Josh Collins have teamed up to create an online international magazine called "The Overclocker". It's not going to compete with anyone. It's going to bind all the world's overclocking communities together, promote overclocking and overclockers, raise the profile within the industry, and offer the odd review. If somewhere like OCAU does something interesting on overclocking we'll tell the world.

We're not going to have our own (proper) website and we're not going to have any forums. Every month we'll be asking questions and directing the global readership to a forum like OCAU for the answer. We'll also be asking questions on your behalf to major people in the industry.

You can view the first issue on their site. There's discussion going on here in our Overclocking & Hardware forum.

From ojk007: Heres a good article from mactalk that sums up the current state of ISP filtering in Australia. In short, we need to get off our arses before our ignorant polictians go ahead with this. I send this to you with a sense of urgency, in that unless we make enough noise we will silently lose this battle. See also nocleanfeed.com.

XbitLabs compared the Force 3D Radeon HD 4870 Vs. Nvidia GeForce GTX 260, wondering if mid-range cards are up to the task of high-resolution gaming. Today we are going to check how well 300-dollar graphics cards can perform in video games in 2560x1600 resolution.

They also have a Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX Extreme Overclocking Experience posted. Will extreme overclocking help Nvidia GeForce 9800 GTX to defeat ATI Radeon HD 4800 and how greatly? Will an extremely overclocked GeForce 9800 GTX be able to complete against the new GeForce GTX 260?

HotHardware report from the Intel Developer Forum, with Craig Barrett's Keynote speech from Day 1. Gelsinger equated the childhood book series Where's Waldo with trying to figure out where in the world Intel chairman, Craig Barrett might be at any given moment. As to "Where in the world is Craig Barrett," the answer could easily be any one of over 30 countries, where Gelsinger suggested that Barrett has become the chief ambassador for the IT industry. HWSecrets have their coverage too.

TechWareLabs have some SAS RAID testing in Linux, with Fujitsu SAS Drives and a Highpoint RocketRAID 2640X4 controller. Michael Bosse tests the Fujitsu SAS hard drives in a linux environment and brings to you expected performance in an enterprise setting.

PCPerspective have a sneak peek at an interesting multi-GPU technology called HYDRA. This start-up company promises to scale GPUs at nearly linear rates and is completely chipset and GPU technology independent. Is it worthy of the hype?

Dennis noticed that Australian company PC Tools has been acquired by Symantec. With the addition of PC Tools, Symantec will expand its consumer product portfolio to include award-winning PC utilities software and point security technologies.

Windwithme has written up another detailed review - this time it's Foxconn's BLACK OPS motherboard based on Intel's X48 chipset. They're presenting this as their ultimate overclocking motherboard, and (among other things) it boasts a northbridge cooler which can handle passive and forced aircooling or watercooling. In fact, they even provide a plastic container for using liquid nitrogen or dry ice!

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has put together a historical timeline of the Internet, incorporating video clips, pictures, and other items from their archives. So, in twenty short years, the Internet has gone from a few networked labs and universities to a multi-layered network connecting hundreds of millions of people. What will the next twenty years hold?

Tom's Hardware Guide roundup fourteen Solid State Drives from a variety of manufacturers. Today, an SSD isn’t necessarily the better choice over a magnetic hard drive, as there is a catch with most of the options out there. Some flash SSDs are much more efficient than hard drives, others are much faster than hard drives, and only a small minority can achieve both. But all are more expensive, especially when you consider cost per gigabyte.

Driver Heaven revisit the Intel Skulltrail platform, by using it to compare performance with three GeForce GTX 280's in Tri-SLI and two Radeon 4870X2's in Crossfire. Even though comparisons will be made, our intention is not to directly compare ATI against Nvidia in this article, but more to see how both leading ultimate solutions will run on a system which should in theory be less CPU bound than most.

Bit-tech Interview ASUS' Richard Liu, senior director of their motherboard division. In amongst the hundreds of litres of liquid nitrogen we had a chance to ask a few questions to Richard Liu, Senior Director of Motherboard Division at Asus. Sadly due to a typhoon in Taipei, we were unable to sit down and get one on one with him, but we were still able to pose him some questions on Nehalem, X58, overclocking and ExpressGate via email.

Tom's Hardware got their hands on an AMD's Athlon 64 2000+, which operates at only 1GHz and draws a maximum of 8W. With the development of the Atom processor, Intel introduced a totally new chip design that consumes very little energy. AMD had to strike back, and did so by clocking down its Athlon 64, employing the K8 micro architecture, down to the lowest possible frequency of 1 GHz.Discussion on the forum.

X-bit Labs continue their series of 19-inch LCD monitor reviews. It covers eight models with a screen aspect ratio of both 5:4 and 16:10. Although the latter aspect ratio is quickly penetrating the low-end market sector, classic 5:4 models are in demand still. Moreover, it is among these classic models that you can occasionally see 19-inchers with matrix types other than TN whereas widescreen 19-inch models are all based on TN technology with its notoriously small viewing angles.

Tech ARP have updated their workstation graphics card comparison guide. These days, there are so many workstation graphics card models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications.

Sniper noticed that the Australian Do-Not-Call Register could be expanded to include faxes and indeed ALL phone numbers. It this is unacceptable, it suggests a more modest expansion to enable phone numbers used by emergency service organisations and phone and fax numbers used by small businesses to be listed. I'll certainly be happy if it turns out to be true!

HotHardware have a 4-way Gigabyte P45 mobo roundup. On the low-end, we have Gigabyte’s EP45-DS3L for DDR2 based systems along with the EP45T-DS3R for DDR3 based systems. On the high-end, we have the much more exciting EP45-DQ6 platform for DDR2 based systems, and for the high-end DDR3 landscape, we have the crème de le crème of Gigabyte’s P45 lineup, the EP45T-Extreme.

They also report on GPU-based ray tracing from NVIDIA. During SIGGRAPH 2008 in Los Angeles NVIDIA is demonstrating a fully interactive GPU-based ray tracer. The demo is based purely on NVIDIA GPU technology, and according to NVIDIA the ray tracer shows linear scaling rendering of a complex, two-million polygon, anti-aliased automotive styling application.

Paul sent word of a coordinated cyber attack between Russia and Georgia. The attacks have already managed to compromise several government web sites, with continuing DDoS attacks against numerous other Georgian government sites, prompting the government to switch to hosting locations to the U.S, with Georgia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs undertaking a desperate step in order to disseminate real-time information by moving to a Blogspot account.

Shadowman sent in this robot you can control. Pretty groovy, gotta wait forever to have a shot, and it only works during daylight hours as its solar powered.

TrustedReviews compared Intel's Atom and VIA's Nano mini platforms. However, technology being the way it is, the two products have converged and in particular are set to cross swords in the highly lucrative netbook market. So, we set out to find out which one is truly the best.

There are now patches for VMWare to fix the bogus product expiry issue we mentioned earlier, thanks Silicon Angel. Info here and here. An issue has been uncovered with ESX 3.5 Update 2 (build 103908) and ESXi 3.5 Update 2 (build 103909) that caused the product license to expire on August 12, 2008. New patches and updates are now available.

Frostytech checked out some of the first socket LGA1366 heatsinks, for Intel's Nehalem CPUs. In the mean time, answers to questions like: 1). Will current Intel socket 775 heatsinks fit on Intel socket 1366 motherboards? 3). Do Nehalem socket 1366 heatsinks use the plastic push pin clips, or something new? 2). If I use a socket 775-to-1366 adaptor bracket to make my existing Intel heatsink fit onto a Socket 1366 motherboard, is that okay?

TechWareLabs rounded up six DDR3 kits. We've seen the best that next generation DDR3 has to offer, but how does each kit compare side by side? Which DDR3 kits were good for overclocking? And possibly the most important question, which DDR3 kit meets your needs?

Here's an interesting one - SuperRoach has gotten his hands on one of those brainwave-reading gaming controllers from OCZ, the "Neural Impulse Actuator". He's made a few YouTube videos about his experiences with it. Check 'em out with more info here.

A serious programming error by VMware has led to ESX machines thinking they are expired when they aren't. When the time clock in a server running ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 hits 12:00AM on August 12th, 2008, the released code causes the product license to expire. So don't reboot or suspend until you've got the patch! Discussion here.

Apparently Crysis Warhead is on the way in September. But that's not all -- also announced was Crysis Wars, a new multiplayer feature in Crysis Warhead that'll come with three modes of play: InstantAction and PowerStruggle from the original Crysis, and the new TeamInstantAction mode that, obviously, adds teams to the mix. Crysis Wars will include 21 maps in total, including six new maps for TeamInstantAction and InstantAction, and one new map for PowerStruggle.

Techgage have part 2 of their ASUS Republic of Gamers coverage. The ASUS RoG Con is done and over with, so we take a look back at what made the weekend so great. Depending on who you ask, the LAN was a great success, with nobody leaving without some sort of swag in their hand. But, there was so much more to it than just that. Will we see another? We sure hope so.

IGN mention some religious hullabaloo about Spore, but more interesting is the casual remark that it's coming out in the first week of September. I thought we'd never see it! Anyway, discussion in the gargantuan Spore thread as always.

Cooler Master's Cosmos S is becoming a hit with the modders.. here's a nicely finished project over on Bit-Tech. After a second, I thought, "What better than a new Skulltrail system to prove the capability of the heavily modded Aquagate?"

For those who missed Intel's announcement this week. Intel Corporation announced that desktop processors based on the company’s upcoming new micro architecture (codenamed "Nehalem") will be formally branded "Intel Core processor." The first products in this new family of processors, including an “Extreme Edition” version, will carry an "i7" identifier and will be formally branded as "Intel Core i7 processor." Discussion on the forum.

Nvidia has officially released a new Forceware driver package, version 177.83 which supports PhysX. Nvidia also released a bundle of software and demos to promote its new products, including a free "full version" game that makes the most of PhysX compatible GeForce cards. Other parts of this pack include the GeForce Folding@Home client, a 30-day trial of the Badaboom Video Transcoding software and Unreal Tournament 3 PhysX mod. Discussion on the forum.

Driver Heaven has released version 0.3 beta of their Nvidia Mobility Modder. With the success of our free ATI modding tool we felt it was a good idea to begin development of an automated tool for nVidia enthusiasts who like to game on the go. Newer drivers have bug fixes, performance enhancements as well as possibly making a hot new game playable on various platforms.

TechGage take the time to clear up some misconceptions about Nvidia's CUDA and Intel's Larrabee. Both Intel and NVIDIA have lots to say about their respective GPU architectures, as well as the competition's. Partly because of this, there are numerous misconceptions floating around about both Larrabee and CUDA, so we decided to see if we could put to rest a few of the most common ones.

Tech ARP has released an overclocking guide for the Nvidia Gefore 9800GTX+. While the use of the new 55 nm G92 processor does provide the GeForce 9800 GTX+ with some overclocking potential. After all, our temperature tests showed that the new GPU was actually cool enough to run 3D games with the fan set to the absolute minimum! So, we just had to try overclocking it to see just how much more overclockable the new GPU would be.

TweakTown compare ultra compact PC platforms from Intel and VIA. Today we will be pitting the Atom platform against the Nano platform. Who has the best performance and energy savings? – Well, we don’t know yet, but by the end of this we will have an informative answer to that. Let’s move on and check out the platforms individually before we get into the testing phase.

Virtual-hideout wrap up their QuakeCon 2008 coverage. So Quakecon is over. I know I promised more updates while things were still going on. But I got to say, being with 3000 gamers, some friends I knew from before, a few new friends I got to know pretty well, you guys get the short end of the stick. So he’s our final coverage of this massive event. Enjoy!

Thanks to all those that sent in the BSOD story from the Beijing Opening Ceremony. So does this make it the biggest BSOD? Or just the most publicised?

We've heard rumours of this for quite a while, but Sniper has spotted more info about a Star Trek themed MMORPG in the works. Emmert said players will begin Star Trek Online as the captain of a small Starfleet or Klingon Empire ship. They can customise their characters from pre-existing "Trek" species - from Klingons to Gorn - and can create entirely new alien races. As they progress through the game, players can increase in rank and gain larger vessels and more crew. Dopefish spotted more info here.

YYK noticed this interesting timeline of internet memes. An interactive view of the all the memes that swept across the internet and burrowed in our zeitgeist. Built from Wikipedia and Memelabs, open for you to add and maintain.

Techgage report from the Republic of Gamers event in Dallas, Texas. There's an exciting event happening in Dallas that comes in the form of a LAN party. Not any usual LAN though, as it's sponsored by some of the biggest companies in the business, including the event leader, ASUS. While the Dallas heat sure isn't fun to deal with, the event more than makes up for it so far.

Notebooks.com have a story about an interesting new ThinkPad from Lenovo. Lenovo’s making a serious first-splash into the mobile workstation market with the ThinkPad W700, a 17-inch workstation that can be configured with an integrated Wacom digitizer and an integrated color calibration system.

From Jon: Thought maybe this would interest a few MythTV and media centre users around the OCAU community. Hopefully you can spam this link on front page to raise awareness of what the TV stations are trying to do to freely available guide data.

Apparently the edited version of Fallout 3 has been approved for sale in Australia, report IGN. While the Classifications Board can take anywhere from a few days and a few weeks to hand down their decision - it seems that the edits made to the Bethesda Softworks title have been successful, with the second edition of the game granted a new MA15+ rating this afternoon. There's an interview about Fallout 3 with Pete Hines from Bethesda on Bit-Tech.

As you may have guessed from our media event report, AMD have unveiled their ATI Radeon HD 4870 X2 video cards. Believe it or not - the best just got better. For the first time ever, 2.4 teraFLOPS of graphics horse power, 1600 stream processors and 2 GB of GDDR5 memory have been combined to create the fastest and most powerful graphics card available today.

It looks like Australian ISP's might join the copyright fight against illegal downloads. The Australian entertainment industry wants internet service providers to act as file-sharing police and caution people who download illegal copies of films, TV shows and music via peer-to-peer networks. The ISPs have made a counter proposal, that they are prepared to support streamlining the process to allow the copyright holders access to subscriber details so they can take legal action," he says. "But ISPs stop short of taking action themselves. Discussion on the forum. Thanks BlaYde

Bit-tech interview one of Bethesda's top men, Pete Hines, and get the low-down on Bethesda's post apocalyptic FPS RPG; Fallout 3. We got a chance to go see Fallout 3 in action recently, and obviously we couldn't turn it down. Though the event itself was the usual blur of excitement and curiously small burgers on cocktail sticks, we bemusedly came to the next day to find that not only had we done a preview, but we also had the chance to interview Bethesda's Pete Hines.

Hardware Zone review Gigabyte's touch screen Vista-based netbook. The M912V crosses a barrier by being both a netbook - and a UMPC due to its form factor and touch screen capabilities. While we wouldn't actually classify the M912V as a UMPC, it's probably pretty close to the original intent of the UMPC makers, especially when you take into consideration that netbooks in general tend to be much cheaper and closer to the price target of US$500 that was originally intended to be for UMPCs.

Hardware Canucks have published their Radeon HD 4870 and HD 4850 Crossfire performance review. In this performance review we will be taking a look at Crossfire configurations with HD4870 cards from Palit, HD4850 cards from Sapphire and a few little interesting twists (Mixed Crossfire) and turns (Crossfire by combining 4800-series and 3800-series cards) along the way.

Techware Labs share their recent experience testing the HP 2133 Ultra Portable Netbook. With all of the sub-notebooks available it becomes increasingly difficult to select one with the right choices. HP has done an excellent job in separating themselves from the rest of this growing market by investing into the overall design and usefulness of the 2133.

Tech ARP have updated their mobile GPU comparison guide. These days, there are so many mobile GPU models that it has become quite impossible to keep up with the different configurations. Therefore, we decided to compile this guide to provide an easy reference for those who are interested in comparing the specifications of the various mobile GPUs in the market as well as those already obsolescent or obsolete.

X-bit Labs published their gaming performance review of Nvidia’s GeForce GTX 280 and 260. Our study of the theoretical potential of Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 graphics architecture showed that these new solutions are pretty promising, however, have a few issues of their own. The test session in contemporary games should cross all t’s and dot all i’s on this matter.

NVIDIA will be releasing the new GeForce drivers and a PhysX driver/pack next tuesday for their GeForce series 8 and newer cards, with Guru3D giving their opinion on what to expect. The features are good, your options in choosing whatever PhysX solution you want to compute in is wide-spread and then the gaming user experience is just great. If you own a capable card; heck, it's free to even try-out.

DriverHeaven look at seven graphics cards that fall into the budget category. The products on test today are all priced between £20 and £70, yet the performance differences between them are vast, making some usable only for HTPC use and 2D gaming while others can be used to power a relatively decent gaming machine.

OCIA have posted another system buying guide, with this one focussing on the parts you'll need to build a mainstream system for around USD $1,200. Our guides are designed with overclocking in mind, so we often select lower-end processors / memory / video cards to save money, because we know these can be overclocked to equal or outperform higher priced hardware.

Invitations for the Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning beta have been sent out. They will play on servers located on mainland Australia and will pave the way for the simultaneous launch of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning across North America, Europe, and the Oceanic region on September 18th. Thanks Peter! Discussion in this thread.

CPU3D went along to the i34 LAN − one of the UK's largest LANs. We'll be checking out the booths from manufactuers such as Coolermaster Crucial, Foxconn, MSI, Antec and many more. Retailers Scan, Aqua PCs, Kustom PCs and CyberPower will also have booths to show off their new range of products.

Several companies are developing technology which can detect and remove debris from airport runways. Most airports have safeguards for identifying and handling FOD, but they come down to little more than dispatching some guy with a broom to sweep the runway twice a day. Fortunately, a handful of companies are taking a more sophisticated approach.

There's going to be an overclocking demonstration by youngpro and moloko_vellocet in Sydney this weekend, during WCG at Luna Park. More info in this thread.

Guszast3r found some info about the person allegedly behind the beijing ticketing scam. Shepherd, now believed to be hiding in Barbados, had planned "one last massive sting" before retiring, Sydney private investigator Ken Gamble, who has been tracking the fraudster's activities since 2003, said yesterday.

Scon spotted this awesome slow-motion lightning video. It's a lightning bolt that's shooting down from the sky, shot in slow motion. I'm not sure exactly how fast this camera is, but it's got to be shooting at a speed faster than the Casio EX-F1 can shoot at, at least at a resolution this high.

Ubisoft are suing a disk replication company, thanks Rezin. It seems that Optical Experts Manufacturing is said to be the source of the PC version Assassin’s Creed that was downloaded over 700,000 times prior to the game’s official release. According to what we are hearing, a copy of the title was leaked by an employee after the game was removed from the company’s premise.

A new curved electronic eye brings us closer to bionic eye technology, according to Nature. John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and his colleagues have taken inspiration from our own eyes to create an electronic version.

If you've ever felt you just wanted to get away from it all and do some hardcore gaming, maybe a gaming pod like this is what you need, thanks WishBone17.

Digit-Life consider the problem of balancing CPU power and graphics card power. These tests are time-consuming - in order to find an optimal processor for a given graphics card, we have to try all combinations of CPUs and cards, so each processor increases the number of configurations many times.

So, it being 08/08/08, the Beijing Olympics will be getting underway today. I personally won't be paying much attention to it, but if you are, or just want to talk about it, keep an eye on our Major Sporting Events Forum which will no doubt be bristling with Olympics-related threads for the next couple of weeks. Bring your smog mask!

The crew from Good Game will be back on our TV screens next Monday night resuming their fourth season. For our first ep back we'll do a quick rundown of what came out over the break, including MGS4, Brawl, Ninja Gaiden 2, Bourne and Age of Conan. We'll also be reviewing Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Soul Calibur IV, and Bajo will chart his progress at this year's E3, talking to the likes of Peter Moore, Peter Molyneux, Cliff Bleszinski, Rod Humble and more.

Bit-tech check out the EVGA GeForce GTX 280 Superclocked. The core is running at 621MHz, up from 602MHz on the stock, the 1GB of GDDR3 runs at 2,268MHz up from 2,214MHz stock, and the shaders are running at 1,350MHz compared to 1,298MHz. These increases represent roughly a three percent overclock, which while not as much as the ten or eleven percent you can get from the very top end of the pre-overclocked GTX 280s, should still produce a noticeable performance advantage over the stock card.

IGN Australia look at what they believe are the five worst games available on the Nintendo Virtual Console. Looking over the selection you could be forgiven for thinking that the range is the result of a work experience kid screw up. … No attention seems to have been paid to appropriateness or quality control. It'd be funny if it wasn't so depressing.

Metku Mods report on their time at The Assembly, Finland's biggest LAN and Demo party. With over 5000 participants this four day event offers a lot of lights, noise and great people. … Like in the past events, the Assembly organization gathered a nice package that included outdoor sports, seminars, tons of combos including music, graphics, demo coding and naturally gaming etc.

If you're looking for a NAS which can hold five SATA drives in any RAID configuration, techPowerUp rates the N5200 PRO from Thecus highly. With plenty of features and a modular design, when it comes to both hardware and software, it fits anyone's needs. As the N5200 PRO uses a fast 1.5 GHz CPU it has serious potential to stomp the competition.

Tech ARP have updated their Hard Disk Drive Myths Debunked guide. This guide was written in response to the numerous fallacies about the hard disk drive that are still being propagated in many discussions. As you read through this guide, you may think that some of these myths may have been made up. We wished it was true.

Some interesting images on the CNET News site look at a new camera with a layout that is similar in the size and shape of the human eye. The curved technology will put an entire image in focus in contrast to today's cameras which take images that are sharper in the center than near the edges, according to researchers. Plus, the technology could be a big step toward the development of a bionic eye similar to the one worn by the "Terminator."

Tom's Hardware take a look at 15 unforgettable processors from Intel. We've seen a lot of Intel CPUs, but a few are real stand-outs. We pick 15 of the most memorable in anticipation of Nehalem, expected to be Intel's next big landmark. The story of the Intel x86 processors doesn’t end with the Core 2, and obviously other models are planned for the Future. Nehalem, Larrabee, and Atom are also on the horizon.

X-Bit Labs analyse Nvidia's GT200 architecture and design. The new Nvidia GTX 200 graphics architecture is just as interesting as the recently announced ATI Radeon HD 4800 that is why it deserves thorough and detailed discussion. Today we are going to talk about the results of synthetic benchmarks obtained from Gainward GeForce GTX 280 and Leadtek GeForce GTX 260.

TweakTown continue their QuakeCon 2008 coverage with booth babes and modified cases. QuakeCon is many things to many people. For the pro gamer it is a place to show your skills; challenging the best of the best and competing against the world’s top teams in everything from Guitar Hero to different variations of Quake. Gamers old and new travel to Dallas, Texas every year, trying to compete for their piece of the prize money.

Hot Hardware evaluate the Asus Eee Box Desktop System. It’s obviously safe to say that Asus put plenty of engineering resources behind their Eee PC project and you almost have to wonder, are they done yet? Not quite. In the realm of small form-factor, low cost computing, there's another market niche' that, believe it or not, the Eee product line has yet to bring out an offering for -- the low cost desktop.

Bit-tech preview the eagerly awaited Fallout 3. So, in short, be afraid. Lock away your wallets and board up your front doors. Handcuff yourself to the furniture and demolish your hard drives and consoles – Fallout 3 is coming and as far as we’re concerned, it’s going to be as excellent as we could have ever hoped. When it launches then it will demolish your life, soak up your spare time and tear apart your relationships.

Apparently tomorrow (Friday) is Pink Shirt Day. In Australia close to 3000 men will die this year from prostate cancer. Pink Shirt Day is a day to raise awareness and encourage men to get checked. Show your support and wear a pink shirt on August 8th.

There seems to be some debate about how "official" Pink Shirt Day is, but I figure promoting awareness of prostate cancer is no bad thing regardless. If you want a more official organisation, try the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia, who don't seem to be directly involved with Pink Shirt Day.

From Nik: I forgot to mention earlier, but there is a docco on SBS, Wednesday 6th, 10:05pm, here in adelaide (not sure about other states, but im fairly confident) about online "identity" and gamers. Its called "Age of Avatars" on the "My Generation" segment. Its made by a guy names Sean (BarracudA) and involved some interviews from Valhalla LAN.

Also, try looking up a docco called "doing it at 100mbit". Its about lan culture / games / etc.. That was his first effort when he went to uni with my missus and they did screen studies.

David sent in word of a new PayPal scam: Someone is sending out emails showing that they come fgrom Paypal asking that you (by name) have a credit card which has expired, they then ask that you reply with your new credit card details to paypal@email.paypal.com.au. Beware accordingly, good chance some will be caught out with such a neat and well made paypal fake page.

Yesterday, Intel unveiled architecture details of its Larrabee processor. The first product based on Larrabee will target the personal computer graphics market and is expected in 2009 or 2010. Larrabee will be the industry's first many-core x86 Intel architecture, meaning it will be based on an array of many processors. Initial product implementations of the Larrabee architecture will target discrete graphics applications, support DirectX and OpenGL, and run existing games and programs. Discussion on the forum.

Driver Heaven roundup a trio of motherboards made by XFX. High end is not their only area of expertise however and recently XFX offered us the opportunity to review a number of their value segment motherboards with onboard graphics, they told us that their products were capable of taking on the best AMD and Intel had to offer. This is quite a claim so after tracking down some impressive AM2/Socket 775 boards we put XFX to their word.

The Tech Report gets busy comparing seven new power supplies. We've rounded up seven PSUs between 600 and 800W from BFG Tech, Enermax, ePower, Mushkin, OCZ, Thermaltake, and Zalman. We've thrown them all into the ring against not only our beastly load generator, but also our current favorite in this wattage range: PC Power & Cooling's Silencer 750W.

TweakTown have published their QuakeCon 2008 coverage, with a nice selection of videos and photos. QuakeCon was a perfect spot for these companies to showcase their products to users. While many attendees were only roaming the Vendor Halls looking for free swag, several were knowledgeable consumers looking to make their purchasing decision based on the companies that support their growing sport.

TweakTown also reviewed a pair motherboards from ASRock, based on Intel's P43 and P45 chipset. Today we have been sent two of the newest members of the 4 series family from ASRock, and they are loaded with features for the home user along with some nice overclocking for the enthusiast. Today we take a look at the ASRock P45R2000-WiFi and the P43R1600Twins-WiFi.

Bit-tech have published their review of the Acer's Aspire One, ultra-portable notebook. Building an UMPC shouldn't be all that hard, but the sheer number of companies out there struggling to get it right seems to imply that there are hidden complexities to the task. The Aspire One from Acer is, I admit, a subnotebook I fell in love with almost as soon as I got my hands on it.

ThinkComputers take a look at the latest motherboards features from Gigabyte. Rather than try to cram this information in an already too-long motherboard review, I thought that I'd describe Gigabyte's Smart Backup, Ultra TPM, and DES Advanced in an article, and refer to the article when needed in motherboard reviews. Read on to find out about these cool features!

Google Street View for Australia has just been officially released, now covering most of the country. Check it out here. AUSTRALIA will today become the third country to have its cities, streets and landmarks "scanned into" Google as the search giant unveils its most ambitious Street View project to date. Google Street View is an online tool that lets users take a virtual tour of landscapes from their computer by perusing an interactive database of millions of 360-degree snapshots. The snapshots are taken by a fleet of cars fitted with special cameras that drive across the country, capturing images on every street corner and along every highway.

There is a thread in our forums discussing it here. Find your house! To use the Street View feature, zoom in on a blue road until you see the little orange man, then click on him.

Thermaltake are having a best build competition which is open to Australians. This competition will run from August 1st to the 31st. By the end of the month we will look through all of the entries and the owner of rig with the most wide spread praise will be awarded with a brand new system courtesy of Thermaltake Australia, GeCube, AMD and OCZ Technology. Discussion here.

The Large Hadron Collider grows ever closer to completion, with some amazing photos over on boston.com. For those hip(hop)sters who don't understand the cool sciency stuff it's going to do, here's an explanation in rap form, discussion here.

Bit-Tech report on the Advanced Overclocking Championships 2008. The two men feverishly dismantling the high end hardware in the room are Paul and Barry, AKA Sacha35 and BazX, the UK team taking part in this year’s Advanced Overclocking Championships (AOCC), now in its second year and held this time in the sprawling high rise of Hong Kong.

A new Vista driver for Creative's X-Fi restores some features that mysteriously vanished earlier. When successive driver updates failed to bring back the features, a Creative forum member known as Daniel_K got to work, but his efforts didn't go over well with the company at first. Now, over a year and a half later, Creative has finally released a batch of official Vista X-Fi drivers that brings back some of the missing functionality. More details and links in this post.

HWZone looked at some new Centrino 2 notebooks. Find out what's new and cool as we cover three separate Intel Centrino 2 notebook launches held this week by Toshiba, NEC and Sony. Catch the newest models and updates to their well-known series and get your wallets ready!

LegitReviews are the latest to compare Atom vs Nano. The Intel Atom and VIA Nano processors have been making a ton of noise in the market place as they are inexpensive, energy efficient and fit into sleek and sexy devices that consumers are looking for today. Armed with the VIA Nano processor and the Intel Atom processor, I can now do a direct performance comparison against two of the most talked about processors for 2008.

IGN and, err IGN both report that a modified version of Fallout 3 has been submitted to the Australian Classification Board and will hopefully be approved. This first popped up over the weekend as a rumour, but the Board has confirmed the new submission today. They have up to 21 days to make their decision, but generally seem to take less than a week.

Dirtyd sent in some PCMark05 oddness discovered by ArsTechnica. None of this constitutes proof of wrongdoing, but it flies in the face of Futuremark's neutrality claims. Bad code is a fact of life, but companies that write benchmarks for a living and sell those benchmarks as evaluation tools have a responsibility to ensure that their software delivers the neutral framework that it promises.

From forum member Deltoid: Prompted by my sister's own battle with cancer while pregnant she has started a charity to help other mums battling cancer whilst pregnant or with young children. For more information about the charity or to make a donation see www.mummyswish.org.au. As part of a fund raising drive Mummy's Wish has a signed and framed 2008 State of Origin Canterbury Baby Jersey for auction. Signed by 8 of the 2008 winning QLD team. This jersey is a "one-off" (being the only baby jersey signed by the Qld team). This jersey is a size 1 all in one, beautifully framed with an engraved plate. See Deltoid's thread in the forums for more information.

Caligari Corporation have made trueSpace7.6 available as a free download! Registration is required. trueSpace7.6 is a fully-featured 3D authoring package that will let you model, texture, light, animate and render 3D content. As well as traditional images and movies, you can also make 3D content for online shared spaces, and for Virtual Earth. Thanks Adam!

Mindy sent word about the Rocket Racing League demonstrating its first racing plane in Oshkosh, Wisconsin. During the demonstration, the plane alternated between unpropelled gliding and rocket-powered flight. The rocket is turned off to preserve fuel and to slow the craft, as the airframe is not meant to withstand speeds much greater than 560 kilometres per hour.

Hardware Secrets have a new article looking at how to identify Japanese electrolytic capacitors. Not all electrolytic capacitors are manufactured equally. Japanese and solid caps have better quality, protecting your equipment from the infamous capacitor leakage problem and also increasing the life-span of your equipment, especially if it works at high temperatures, like it is the case with power supplies.

The Tech Report look into the rumours that are circulating about how Nvidia is set to exit the chipset business. Puzzled, we asked Nvidia Platform Products PR chief Bryan Del Rizzo to weigh in. Del Rizzo's response came swiftly and left little open for interpretation.

PC Perspective also weigh in on these rumours. It's been a whirl-wind past few weeks for NVIDIA - bad mobility GPUs, the possibility of seeing NVIDIA inside Apple machines and now the death of the NVIDIA chipset products. Quite a bit for a single company to take all at once, but how much truth is there to the idea of the end of the nForce?

OCAU's Folding@Home team has been pushing hard this winter to beat the [H]orde and regain the number one spot. While the team has been contributing over 2.5 Million points per day, we still need your help to increase this number and make the most of the winter season, as during summer this lead tends to drop off somewhat.

The team is still looking for 200 new 8800GT (or greater) cards to fold on, if you are ready to start, then check out this thread for instructions. Don't have a GPU to spare? Folding@Home works on your CPU as well! There's a guide to getting started here.

So, if you would like to help scientists learn about diseases like Cancer, Alzheimer's Disease, Parkinson's Disease, Huntington's Disease, Osteogenesis Imperfecta - possibly help find a cure for it and put OCAU back in the number one spot - then drop by the Distributed Computing section and see how you can be a part of it.

NASA says it has proof that water exists on Mars, after further tests on ice found on the planet in June by the Phoenix Mars Lander. Dr Boynton says traces of water have only been observed from a distance before by the Mars orbiter."But we've now finally touched it and tasted it. That's one thing that hasn't been done before and I'd like to say from my standpoint, it tastes very fine, I'm very glad to be in this position". Discussion on the forum.

Scientists at MIT have come up with a new fuel cell process that mimics the way plants store the sun's rays, overcoming a major barrier to large-scale solar power: storing energy for use when the sun doesn't shine. Inspired by the photosynthesis performed by plants, Nocera and Matthew Kanan, a postdoctoral fellow in Nocera's lab, have developed an unprecedented process that will allow the sun's energy to be used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen gases.

Tom's Hardware compare Nvidia nForce 790i Ultra SLI based Motherboards. Nvidia's history left us expecting little in the way of improvements from its 790i series chipsets. But we were in for a surprise. In spite of its antiquated 90 nm production process, the new northbridge features a fully modernized design.

QuakeCon 2008, the world's premier multiplayer gaming event is happening right now in Dallas, Texas. QuakeCon isn’t just a gaming event, many of the world’s hottest technology companies are there to demonstrate their products and meet their customers. You can find coverage on GameSpy, MaximumPC and Shacknews.

Dan answers questions about Memory access patterns, de-gooping a CPU, measuring the thickness of one's pipe, and mysterious LCD resolutions. His latest letter can be found here.

TweakTown have a simple guide to buying blu-ray movies from overseas. Where the good ole' DVD is no longer bound by region locked woes, Blu-ray still is. TweakTown assists you bypassing this issue.

Dell made a statement earlier this week regarding Nvidia's mobile graphics chip issue, now Hewlett Packard has released a list of affected notebook models, which may have defective GPUs from Nvidia. A list of notebooks and links can be found here.

Nvidia announced a trio of video cards a couple days ago. The new GeForce 9800 GTX+, 9800 GT, and the 9500 GT GPUs deliver exceptional graphics quality, performance, and application compatibility, along with support for NVIDIA SLI technology, the industry’s leading multi-GPU solution for gaming and enthusiast platforms across a wide variety of price points.

Anandtech get busy with Foxconn's Black Ops motherboard, aimed for those wanting the best or overlockers wanting to push the limits. Usually we can't wait to get boards off the subzero benching station as the effort required does not justify the end result; not so with the Black Ops. We thoroughly enjoyed using this board at subzero temperatures; it runs insane speeds with relative ease, leading to a truly exhilarating benchmark experience.

Tom's Hardware take a look at Nvidia's graphic card history over the past 13 years. This article will show you that it hasn’t been all successes for Nvidia along the way, and that the company didn’t have an easy time of it in the early days. But it also shows how two companies have managed to do away with most of the competition in the field of graphics cards for gamers.

HardOCP compare VIA's Nano and Intel's Atom processors. These are very different products with a surprising amount of overlap in their intended target markets. VIA's Nano will stretch from mini-notes and UMDs to standard notebooks and optimized desktop PCs. Intel's Atom processor will be found in small MIDs and will stretch into mini-notes and MAYBE some notebooks, etc.

X-bit Labs roundup a variety of Adaptec RAID Controllers. Today's comparison will be devoted to five Adaptec RAID controllers. We will test not only the popular Serial ATA models, but also the solutions supporting SAS storage devices.

Bit-tech have published a hands-on preview of Crysis: Warhead. EA and Crytek are actually billing Warhead as neither an expansion or a sequel to the original game, responding even to direct questions about the matter with the here-nor-there reply of “This is the latest instalment, not a sequel or an expansion.” In other words, though Crysis was announced as a trilogy, this second game is not the second game in the series.

Digit-Life compare Low-End Single and Dual-Core processors from AMD and Intel. We are going to review the slowest modern processors from both competitors: Low-End single-core AMD Sempron LE and Intel Celeron (Conroe-L) processors, as well as the weakest dual-core CPUs: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3600+ and Pentium E2140. These processors are manufactured for a reason, aren't they? So, we'll find out what they can do and how fast.

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